Black and grey handwritten script tattoo reading 'You are the page, the ink, the poem' across a woman's upper back, with a long braid and white ribbon.

Handwritten quote on the upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her back to the camera shows a handwritten script tattoo across her upper back, reading 'You are the page, the ink, the poem...' over four staggered lines. The lettering is fine and fairly thin, in black ink on pale skin, with the words set at slightly different offsets. The black and white photograph is softly lit, and a dark braid with a white ribbon hangs over her left shoulder.

Lettering Fine line Back Quote Script Handwriting Braid Ribbon Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The scribe came to the Eastwold barn dance the year the river froze, and he set his little table by the door where the draught could not reach his ink. Nobody asked him to dance. They asked him to write, because the young men of the parish had made promises to girls in other villages and needed them put down properly.

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A widow's son named Tam came with a torn cuff of paper and asked for words that would make a miller's daughter stay. The scribe told him he could not write what was not already in him. Tam laughed and said he had paid his penny. So the scribe took up his pen and wrote the sentence he had carried since boyhood: you are the page, the ink, the poem. Tam read it and went red to the ears.

The miller's daughter, Ada Fell, came to the table after the second reel, a braid over her shoulder tied with a white ribbon that had been her mother's. She read the paper twice. 'He cannot make me a poem,' she said. 'He can only write down one that was already there.' Then she took the pen herself, crossed out nothing, and wrote beneath it: and I will not be blotted.

The scribe packed his table at dawn and left the paper on the bench. Tam kept it folded in his coat for forty years, and the people of Eastwold say no one else ever read it. The scribe, they say, learned that night that a sentence is only half the work, and the other half is waiting for someone to answer it.